members did the work for me unbidden- after painting her as incredibly shallow, they found some dirt on her family that made Max’s heritage seem noble by comparison.
“I’m so sorry this has happened to her,” he told me, more upset by those reports than by anything that had been said about him.
He told us this over dinner at our house. Tuna casserole-lifestyles of the rich and famous.
He was spending a lot of time with us these days. Frank didn’t seem to mind. They had formed their own friendship, and even though Max was now without a fiancee, I guess Frank had figured out what Max and I had figured out a long time ago.
“I wish I could be sorry for her,” I said, “because it would fool everyone into thinking I am a much better person than I am. She didn’t deserve you.”
He shook his head. “She wasn’t ready for what happened-all the publicity. She’s a private person.”
I decided not to respond to that.
He must have seen something of my thoughts, though, because he smiled and said to Frank, “God help anyone who harms someone Irene cares about.”
“True,” Frank said. He’s smarter than I am, though, because he immediately changed the subject by asking questions that led to an animated discussion about the ways GPS could help with law enforcement. Max forgot his troubles for a while. He talked about how cargo containers could now carry signaling devices that could help locate stolen goods.
“Lots happening in the area of tracking the movements of parolees,” Max said. “They could be tagged with lightweight devices and you would always know where they were. And even have the devices programmed to send a call to local law enforcement if, say, a sex offender goes into an area near a school or playground.” Which was fine as far as it went, I thought, but I stayed quiet and didn’t spoil their mood by asking if anyone had read any George Orwell lately.
At the end of the evening, just as he was leaving, Max said, “I have to try to find out what became of that child. The two of you understand that, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ve been trying to figure out what we could do.”
“So have I,”he said. “Frank, I know it didn’t help much last time, but I want to offer the reward again. Maybe after all these years, someone will finally come forward. I’ll up it to two hundred and fifty thousand. I’ll add a grant to the department to help staff phones, if that’s what it takes. I don’t know what’s allowed and what isn’t, but-can you help me with this?”
“Sure,” Frank said. “Let me run it by my lieutenant. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
The reward made our phones ring again. Sometimes the callers hadn’t even been born at the time of the kidnapping. We got one “repressed memory” case of a woman who believed her father had buried the child in the family backyard, but real estate records showed the family hadn’t moved to Las Piernas until 1961 or purchased the home in question until 1964.
I kept hoping Betty Bradford would call.
In the meantime, DNA tests on the scrapings from beneath Maureen O’Connor’s nails excluded Bennie Lee Harmon-at least as the person who had been scratched when she fought off her attacker. Harmon was doing better now, but had become less talkative.
“The business of the graves bothers me,” Frank said. “Harmon was mostly a drifter, didn’t stay any one place for long. When he was here, though, he must have confided in someone. Or he was followed. I started to wonder if he had married or had a girlfriend, or had a crush on someone from work.” Frank had looked up Harmon’s Social Security records. “He was 4-F, so he wasn’t in the military. No army buddy. I thought he might have worked for the aircraft plant, and maybe found someone nearly as odd as he was there. Or maybe he had been followed from there out to the grove.”
“By someone who also knew Maureen. It makes sense,” I said.
“Except he didn’t work at the aircraft plant. He worked as a driver for a company that sold agricultural supplies,” he said. “Probably how he chose the orange grove in the first place. He basically doesn’t play well with others, so his job choices were usually ones where he could be alone much of the day.”
“And he might have used the company truck to haul young women off to an orange grove?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Did he ever tell you why he chose April as his big month?”
“No, but that was something he told one of the other investigators this past week-I guess it has to do with Easter, not April. His mother died on Easter in 1939. His killings all took place within seven days after Easter.”
“Then the person who knew about the graves in the orange grove didn’t just follow him out there. The person who killed her knew about the Easter thing, too. Maureen was killed within a week of Easter.”
“Damn. Once I knew it wasn’t him, I didn’t check the date against the Easter calendar. You’re sure?”
“Yes. The last photo O’Connor had of his sister was taken on Easter Sunday, just a few days before she died.”
Ethan came back to work. He looked as if he had lost about fifteen pounds. He didn’t have fifteen pounds to spare. He also looked as if he hadn’t been getting much sleep. His desk had been moved back near mine, placed just on the opposite side of it.
I said, “Welcome back, Ethan.”
He nodded without looking up or saying anything. It occurred to me that he probably thought I was being sarcastic.
Lydia gave him every shit assignment that came into the city desk. She handed the plums to Hailey and other reporters. Ethan did his work without complaint. And without making eye contact with anyone in the newsroom.
He was careful to keep his eyes averted from the surfaces of other people’s desks, too, and looked at no computer monitor other than his own, staring down at his shoes whenever he got up to get a phone book or moved for any other reason. Sometimes I wondered how he made it across the newsroom without bumping into anything. Every now and then, I saw another reporter go out of his way to jostle him. Ethan would apologize and move on.
More than once, he had to call the computer folks to supply a new password. It seems any new one he came up with was soon discovered and then used to change it to another password without his knowledge. I thought he might have complained to management about it, because after about a week of that, at a staff meeting, John said, “The next person who fucks around with another reporter’s computer will be fired on the spot. I will set up security cameras in the newsroom if I have to. The fun’s over, boys and girls.” Ethan turned beet red and shook his head slightly.
I said, “John, who reported the problem to you?”
“Those propeller heads in the computer department,” he said without hesitation. “I can’t make sense out of half of what they say to me, so none of you are to make them talk to me again, understand?”
The next morning, I watched as Ethan navigated his way to his desk. He sat down and pulled a drawer open. All its contents fell out onto the floor with a tremendous clatter. Across the newsroom, there was laughter.
He said nothing, staring at the mess for a moment, then knelt on the floor and began picking up the scattered contents.
I stood up, went around to his desk, knelt next to him, and started helping.
“Please don’t,” he whispered.
“It’s an old trick,” I said, pretending I didn’t hear him. “Don’t open any of the others, they’ll be upside down, too. Someone takes a thin piece of cardboard, uses it to hold the contents in while the drawer is flipped over and reinserted. Very hard to detect first thing in the morning.”
At some point during this explanation, he stopped moving. Mark Baker and Stuart Angert came over and fixed the other drawers while I continued to hunt down paper clips, pens, loose change, and Post-it notes. The newsroom had fallen silent.
John’s hearing is never so attuned to anything as a lack of noise in the newsroom. He came to his door, glanced over at us, then turned to the rest of the room and shouted, “What the hell are you being paid to do?”
